Robocalls report clearest sign yet of our democracy’s decay

I guess Elections Canada must have a selfie-video of Michael Sona looking into his cell-phone and cackling,”I just sent a hundred people to the wrong poll and I intended to do it…hahahaha.”

After reading Yves Cote’s account of Election Canada’s three-year investigation of robocalls in the 2011 election, you pretty much understand why trying to steal elections is so tempting for people who believe if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.

The best that can be said about the recent report into Robocalls is that at least Elections Canada publicly accounted for its decision not to pursue any charges. Regardless whether you believe their explanation, that was the responsible thing to do.

The RCMP, the Crown’s Office and the minister of justice have offered no similarly detailed explanation of why the investigation into Nigel Wright was dropped. That was, and remains, deeply troubling.

After all, no one knows the chain of events that led to that outcome and who actually made the decision to drop the investigation. It is now legal for a chief of staff of a prime minister to give $90,000 to a sitting legislator and go to considerable trouble to hide that fact as long as he has good intentions. There is a well-known tropical destination paved with good intentions, right?

People need to be clear on what EC’s decision doesn’t mean since we live in an era of bullshit and blarney. It doesn’t mean that nothing happened here. During the writ period, there were complaints from 11 ridings about calls from Conservative campaigns directing voters to the wrong polls. By May 6, 2011 there were 49 complaints from about 40 electoral districts across Canada. But returning officers were sometimes not able to provide names or numbers for people who complained. Robocalls was still a relatively new animal in 2011 – at least the devious kind.

The powers of EC investigators were already woefully inadequate before Bill C-23 came along. If it passes, even in its amended form, things will just get worse.

According to Cote’s report, some complainants reported calls from the Conservative party asking if they would support the party. Once they told the caller they would not, they received a second call a short time later directing them to vote at a location not on their Voter Identification Card.

Investigators found it “understandable” that voters felt this was “an indication that something inappropriate was happening.” No kidding. But for a criminal investigation, Cote lectured “more than a close juxtaposition in time is required.” Investigators could not find evidence linking the two events.

What Yves Cote’s report really means is that not all elements of an offence under the Elections Act as written could be established. A big part of the reason for that is the weak investigative powers of the Commissioner rather than a shortage of skullduggery.

It really comes down to the fact that the Elections Canada Act is like a worn out pair of your grannie’s lace-ups. The commissioner can’t compel evidence, and persons of interest can decline to be interviewed by EC investigators. Cote noted that “In one instance, a person who investigators believed could have provided very relevant information declined to be interviewed.”

Many others in this investigation did the same thing. And apparently there is no such thing as attempted voter suppression. Unless a voter is actually prevented from voting, there is no offence. And that’s not all. If incorrect poll information is given out and a citizen wants to pursue a complaint it is “not sufficient to simply prove the content of the call and the identity of the caller.” It is also necessary to prove the call was made with the intention of preventing an elector from voting. The burden of proof, “is the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Believe it or not, the same burden of proof applies to harassing calls: “To transmit false or mistaken information without the requisite intent, however objectionable it may be, is not, in itself, an offence under the Act,” Cote reports.

Think about that for a moment. Without the element of mens rea or guilty mind, a rogue robocaller is not breaking the law merely by misdirecting voters to the wrong poll. In order for an offence to take place, there are two additional requirements. The voter must prove as a result of the call, he didn’t vote; and investigators have to be satisfied that the robocaller intended his misinformation to stop the person from voting.

You see why the jails will not soon be filled with cheating robocallers. Why else would a robocaller send a person to the wrong poll — to introduce him to a part of town he’s never seen before?

As a matter of fact, EC investigators did find six complainants in parts of the country other than Guelph who told them that they did not vote because of misleading robocalls. Since no one was charged in those instances, the assumption is that EC either didn’t believe them, their evidence was not documented beyond the recollection of a call made months before, or the robocaller did not intend to prevent them from voting by sending them to the wrong poll.

And here is something else to remember: One political party asked EC for polling site information before the last federal election. Guess which one? EC made the information available to all parties but there were restrictions accompanying the data. Elections Canada expressly told the campaigns not to provide poll site information to voters. EC specified that, “the database was for internal purposes only, and was not to be ‘used to inform voters of their voting locations via mail-outs or other forms of communication.'”

Despite the “warning”, the Conservative Party of Canada did exactly what EC had forbidden it to do — use the restricted EC database to contact voters about their polling stations.

EC investigators found that Conservative telemarketing firm RMG attempted to call 289 complainant numbers. Of those reached, in almost every case RMGs callers properly identified themselves as calling from the Conservative party as required.

However, “Investigators found that a number of RMG callers told electors at which poll location they should vote, rather than asking electors to verify the poll location indicated on their VIC as outlined in the script.”

I wonder what Elections Canada will do about that? A fine, a go-to-your-room-without-your supper, a sigh?

The poll information given out by RMG callers to voters who complained to EC was incorrect 27 per cent of the time.
According to Cote’s report, when EC did a random sample of 1,000 calls done by RMG callers to voters who had not complained, only 1 per cent of the poll information was incorrect. Hmmm.

Some Conservatives would have you believe that the Commissioner of Elections Canada has exonerated them. Remember, these are the same people who called pleading guilty to a lesser charge of cheating in the 2006 election a “victory.” Elections Canada hasn’t exonerated the CPC, it just decided not to proceed with charges.

There is no question that this was a difficult, novel, and taxing investigation for Elections Canada — especially with a hostile PMO waiting to pounce on any mistake Complaints were made months after the triggering event, and your average citizen doesn’t record evidence like a trained police officer.

But this investigation should not have taken three years to complete. The powers of EC investigators were already woefully inadequate before Bill C-23 came along. If it passes, even in its amended form, things will just get worse.

Ironically, if Canadians take the time to read Cote’s Summary Investigation on Robocalls, the report just might have an unintended consequence. When people see how difficult it is to get satisfaction from a complaint, and how easy it is to cheat in elections, they might just have another reason not to vote.

As I’ve said before, it is raining bananas. It will be pouring bananas in 2015 if Pierre Poilievre’s notion of electoral reform carries the day.

It seems obvious that all the people involved in doing this – and there must have been a lot of them – knew how to dodge and weave around all the flaws in our system.
Karl Rove is famous for scientifically figuring out how to win U.S. elections by highly organized candidate-smearing and vote suppression, and has been reportedly a conscience-be-damned, win at any cost, kind of guy.
Apparently his group met with Conservatives and gave them a lot of election training when Harper still had a minority.
I’m sure they were very clever about how they met with them, but do we know anything more about these meetings other than suspicion?
The 2011 phoning techniques seem to have right-wing U.S. fingerprints all over them.
Americans confirm they are common down there, and suddenly they appear out of the blue in 2011 with no history here until then.

Of course there were secret meetings. It was all part of the grand conspiracy to steal the election that nobody has been able to find any evidence of. Of course, the complete lack of evidence is the biggest indication that there *must* be something going on, because it’s simply not possible that the Conservatives won the election fair and square. Because everybody knows only Liberals can win elections fairly in Canada, the other parties are all cheaters and are evil and eat puppies!!!

Please name the nefarious members of “Rove’s group” and/or some evidence of this claim…what we do know is that the Liberal Party hired Larry Summers, a former Obama campaign organizer, who also assisted Bill Clinton gain his two election wins…now you will have to find a new faux scandal to pursue since the senate expense account scandal blew a tire with the charges against Mahmoud Harb and the Fair Elections Act has gained traction with voters now that the Elections Canada liberal bias has been exposed…..

GSW, is that you?
Obviously you didn’t read my post.
That’s exactly what I’m asking.
Mainstream media reported that Karl’s group met with Conservative election planners before the 2011 election.
I’m asking if there is any evidence anything clear occurred other than suspicion. Same to you, Rick Omen, I asked a question.
Please don’t clutter this site with misrepresentation of everything you see as an attack on Stephen, when you don’t bother to read the posts or even try to discern their intent.
It was a question.
And yes, Larry Summers is a disreputable guy. That has nothing to do with my post.
I’m not Liberal.

Michael, your one-trick pony’s time is up. Yes, I realize that everything you’ve written in the last 3 years has been based on the Conservative’s “stealing” the election, but that’s been proved to be a complete and utter lie by you and your partisan ilk in the press. Every reputable pundit in the land has admitted as much, except for you. You continue to claim that there was some grand conspiracy despite the fact that there is not even a shred of evidence to support your outrageous claims.

Louise Charron, a former Supreme Court justice said “I am unable to say if the result of this investigation might have been different in a world where none of these investigative challenges existed,” the challenge being no co-operation from witnesses. The Rigged Election Act now gives all the parties the right to cheat, to commit fraud, as proving it is now on the shoulders of the voter and proving it is impossible, but at least it is now a level playing field. Even if the outcome is not affected, even a small amount of fraud can still have a damaging effect if not punished, as it can reduce voters’ confidence in democracy. Even the perception of fraud can be damaging as it makes people less inclined to accept election results as happened with the In/Out Scandal of 2008 which has tarnished Canada’s reputation and made so many of us suspicious. Misinformation was used in 2011 and now with the new Act it will be disenfranchisement, the easiest to use w/o breaking laws. Make sure you are not ‘accidentally’ removed from the electoral roll, making it difficult or impossible to vote. Do not be intimidated, use your digital devices at your polling station for all encounters w/ election officials. Yes it has come to that.

Yes, it does. So why isn’t anybody condemning the 39,000+ fake complaints that were filed with Elections Canada thanks to leadnow.ca?

The report is quite clear that there was no widespread fraud, so any taint on our democracy has come from the false allegations coming from certain activist groups and members of the media who continue to insist that there was some conspiracy despite a complete and utter lack of evidence.

The very people who are complaining about the state of democracy in Canada are the ones who have made it so due their inability to acknowledge the fact that they’ve been losing elections.

“In all, 39,350 of the more than 40,000 “communications” with Elections Canada were from people expressing “their profound dissatisfaction with inappropriate calls​,” the report said, and not from people who received the calls.”
—–
“There will be court challenges on the new rigged act.”

So what? Just because some leftist lawyer has nothing better to do with their time, doesn’t mean the bill is wrong or illegal. I understand, your party isn’t able to win an election, so you feel you need to resort to the court’s to have your bidding done. That doesn’t work either, but they need to be seen attempting to do something to distract their supporters from their utter failure as a political party.

Are you smarter than a 4th grader or did u get lumpy gravy w/ your sunday supper? The Conservative government has spent $482 million dollars of taxpayer money on outside legal fees since it came to power in 2006 to defend himself and his ministers. I don’t belong to a political party and I never will. He’s not a leftist lawyer, he’s a lawyer.

This country reeks with corruption, right up to the Space Station. Harper has been a litany of, lies, deceit, thefts, corruption, dirty politics, dirty tactics and he cheats to win.

Harper is the one and only Canadian PM ever, to be held in contempt of Parliament. He has shamed and disgraced this country. Even other countries dislike Harper. They detest his bullying and his hissy fits, when he doesn’t get his own way.

That means 650 calls were from people who had received them. And many more complaints that were magically lost by returning officers…

“During the writ period, there were complaints from 11 ridings about calls from Conservative campaigns directing voters to the wrong polls. By May 6, 2011 there were 49 complaints from about 40 electoral districts across Canada. But returning officers were sometimes not able to provide names or numbers for people who complained.”
So figure that is 700 which is greater than 10% of the margin of victory of all close seats across Canada of 6201 seats. Now figure probability of a person who had received such a call actually filing a complaint, it’s very very low, most people would just shrug it off, and a tiny portion, probably single digit percentages, would file any complaint.
Statistically it appears that given 40 affected districts and over 700 actual complaints, it is very likely that the election was stolen. A random sampling of persons who had intended to vote but did not (remember these are marginal voters paying little attention to the political process and system, by definition, and thus to the news) might reveal much more about the extent than relying simply on self-selected actual filed complaints.
The Chief Justice explains in depth in the Etobicoke decision why a criminal “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, which is *not* laid out in the Act but in that decision by a 5-4 bare majority of which the Chief Justice was in the minority, is entirely wrong for elections.
Which are statistical in nature.

Since you hosted your afternoon gab-fest on CFRA some years ago and …. wait for it ….. your award-winning on-air love-in with Elizabeth May (she told you a fib or two) prior to the 2011 (?) elections…. let’s not forget your ensuing exit stage left from aforementioned radio tower …. You’ve become quite addled old chum… You’ve caught HPS (Harper Derangement Syndrome)…. Note: you have friends over at the The Citizen with whom you can commiserate ….

Stephen Harper is a terrorist who deliberately issued permits to two known unsafe train operators specifically hauling dangerous cargo. While not upgrading Canadian cargo rail regulations to US standards – no GPS on cars, nothing. Irving – which is pushing a dirty death pipe east – “mislabels” a car and next thing you know four dozen people are dead.
And the dirty death pipe pushers like Ezra Levant are out the next day to exploit the terror and pretend it was committed by someone who had no interest at all in making rail transport look unsafe…
The Conservative Party of Canada deserves extermination and not just politically. That is not derangement, that is an analysis widely shared by many scientists, jurists and policy analysts worldwide.

Poor Mr. Harris
Like Many progressives if decisions and events don’t fit their world view – then it’s criminal.
This is the kind of press coverage that resulted in 3500 plus stories about a scandal that never was and media awards to journalists who didn’t deserve them. No wonder public trust in the press has fallen so low.

You clearly don’t understand the difference between the Guelph investigation and the nation-wide investigation. How is anybody supposed to take your so-called “opinion” seriously when you clearly don’t even have any knowledge of the situation at hand?

Okay so please explain, how does ONE 23 year-old man record a message purportedly from Elections Canada in French and in a woman’s voice? Are you saying that although the Conservative Party must be lying in Guelph, that they are telling the truth about the robocalls outside of Guelph?

So Harris can’t accept the fact that there wasn’t a Robocall scandal even though the media manufactured it. Therefore he has to say that democracy is in decay because the results don’t match his wish. Doesn’t work that way Mr. Harris.

When a Government spokesperson, Dean Del Mastro, gets up in the House and declares that he is certain that the Cabinet or top officials of the Conservatives had nothing to do with it… having not conducted any investigation whatsoever to prove this from neutral perspective… he is admitting that he actually knows who *did* do it.
There is just no way around that logic. Conservatives admitted they knew by insisting they knew that none of their own had done it. Something that could only be known in one way: Knowing for sure who did.

keep up the campaign against the Harper Orwellian anti-democratic assault. His slash and burn policy aided by Pollievre and Clements. Problem is… it seems public has agreed with his style, tenure and half truths…the polls for CPC are headed upwards. Rob Ford and Stephen Harper for life!! It’s a very sad commentary, but we will stand up against this mock government. Change is hopefully coming. Canada needs to be liberated from the negativity and the bullying, the waste and manipulation of parliamentary institutions. Please keep the truth coming…don’t let the short pants brigade below dissuade you from keeping the democracy alive.

45 amendments to Polievre’s perfect Elections Act. Nigel Wright isn’t charged, Supreme Court squashes Harper’s judge, Harper’s bodyguard is named Ambassador, Porter is charged, Duffy is named, Wallin is thrown under the bus, Guergis is dismissed. Limo to India, science muzzled, environment ignored, parliament shut down and omnibus bills now the norm. And a federation where the leader does not sit down with the “partners” and talk! Imagine, a federation where the participants have never sat in a room with Harperland! Why? For the omens and the minions of ignorance, here is one of your own CPC insider’s view of Harper. Again, a cause to celebrate “the CPC has not been charged.” Yes Michael, stay the course, there’s something scary and Nixonian about that! Here’s Harper’s former Chief of Staff…

“I was also worn out from trying to work with Harper. He has enormous
gifts of intelligence, willpower, and work ethic; but there is also a
dark, almost Nixonian side to the man,” he writes.

“He believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules,
which inevitably means some team members will step across ethical or
legal lines in their desire to win for the Boss. He can be suspicious,
secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage
over meaningless trivia, at other times falling into week-long
depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions.”

My greatest concern in all this is that harper will start throwing cash around and won’t stop until 2015, and Canadians will forget all about the horrible things going on in the country. And vote for this criminal again. We are seriously screwed.

One of the people hailing the ruling was Ottawa-area
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, who, as coincidence would have it, was once
the owner of one of those automated-dialing “voter research” firms, called 3D
Contact.

Poilievre was promoted this week to Minister of State for
Democratic Reform. He’s now in charge of
long-awaited reforms to Canada’s
election laws.

Or is that Pierre “Prince Joffrey” Poilievre who demanded that sexually abused native children provide some proof of “value for money” for their residential schools compensation. As if they were voluntary adult prostitutes choosing to vend sex and suffer violent abuse for money. Something I am sure Pierre learned all about at the U of Calgary under his professor Tom Flanagan – in a strictly theoretical sense of course.

Mr Harris spends a great deal of time talking about the Conservative Party’s use of the poll location database and wails about the necessity of mens rea. What he seems to deliberately omit is that the intent for the use of this data was actually established in these cases: to provide voters with accurate information about where they could vote. This was established as a matter of error long, long ago.

As with the Nigel Wright affair, the simple fact of the matter is a lack of material evidence to support not only the allegations made, but the past several years of Mr Harris’ work.

The data could only be used to confirm what the VIC said. it could not be used to actually tell people where to vote, for the very good reason that any error amounts to a stolen vote. Something no ethical party wants to be blamed for, and no regulator wants to have to blame a party for.
The Conservative Party of Canada, a criminal organization, broke that rule deliberately. As a direct consequence they are rightfully blamed for lost and stolen votes.
“Lack of material evidence” means little where no money or power exists to investigate. Any successful street killer who can dump the body can claim the same.

It’s obvious to any fool what happened.
In return for dropping the “Fair Elections Act”, which removed most of its powers, Elections Canada preserved its own powers and fulltime staff jobs by issuing this whitewashed report.
If you look into how the actual funds were spent by EC it’s obvious it wasn’t investigation…

“…some complainants reported calls from the Conservative party asking if they would support the party. Once they told the caller they would not, they received a second call a short time later directing them to vote at a location not on their Voter Identification Card.”

This clearly satisfies the civil definition of balance of probability. Meaning anyone can *call* this activity criminal and the Conservative Party of Canada may avoid conviction but it cannot successfully sue in civil court for someone calling it crime. Just as OJ can’t sue people who call him a murderer despite his lack of criminal conviction, as he was found liable for 2 deaths.

“EC investigators did find six complainants in parts of the country other than Guelph who told them that they did not vote because of misleading robocalls.”

So the story that there was “no evidence” of RoboCon beyond Guelph is thus clearly false.

“During the writ period, there were complaints from 11 ridings about calls from Conservative campaigns directing voters to the wrong polls. By May 6, 2011 there were 49 complaints from about 40 electoral districts across Canada. But returning officers were sometimes not able to provide names or numbers for people who complained.”

Who were these returning officers and why did they not record the details of the complainants?

And why would Pierre “Poutine” Poilievre try to put the winning party in charge of choosing the electoral officials for the next election, if not to deliberately ‘lose’ any such complaints?